I’m offering the following to fill out on last week’s very brief diary; see P.S. 2 for a belated explanation in reaction to the execution of the original.
US escalates killing on both sides of Afghanistan-Pakistan border
29 September 2010, wsws.org… The Karzai regime has appointed a commission to investigate a US air strike that killed 31 Afghans last Friday. While occupation spokesmen claimed that all those who died were “insurgents,” local residents demonstrated against what they charged was the slaughter of innocent men, women and children, and now the local governor has acknowledged that roughly half of the victims were civilians.
Meanwhile, the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency have dramatically escalated their shadowy war on the other side of the border in Pakistan. According to the New York Times, the number of missile strikes by pilotless drone aircraft has been doubled, with at least 21 having been conducted so far this month. …
According to Pakistani authorities, 708 people were killed in 51 drone strikes in 2009, and another 600 or more have died in the 75 such strikes carried out so far this year. This adds up to more than 1,300 slaughtered since Obama entered the White House. The overwhelming majority of the victims – referred to vaguely by officials and the media as “suspected militants” – are civilians, including women and children.
From ‘Tears for Gaza‘
Shooting Handcuffed Children
By David Swanson
January 2, 2010
OpEdNews.comThe occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead.
WikiLeaks VIDEO Exposes 2007 ‘Collateral Murder’ In Iraq
April 5, 2010
HuffingtonPost.com
…
… None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.
“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.
A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”
Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.
And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”
From ‘Tears for Gaza‘
US soldiers ‘killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies’
Soldiers face charges over secret ‘kill team’ which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 9 September 2010
Andrew Holmes, Michael Wagnon, Jeremy Morlock and Adam Winfield are four of the five Stryker soldiers who face murder charges. (Photograph: Public Domain)
My report was too hot to broadcast: Brisbane war correspondent
Kate Dennehy
September 19, 2010
Brisbane Times…He alleges that a teenager in a remote Iraqi village run by the militant Islamist group, al-Qaeda was carrying a weapon to protect himself.
“(The boy) approached the house we were in and the (US) soldiers who were watching our backs, one of them put a bullet right in the back of his head. Unfortunately it didn’t kill him,” he tells Australian Story.
“We all spent the next 20 minutes listening to his tortured breath as he died. …
“I indeed had been [as] indifferent as the soldiers around me whose indifference I was attempting to capture.”
The preceding inspired BobHiggins diary (my comments in the sub-blockquotes):
Chicken Hawks, Carry Home My Seabag, The Heavy One
… A people that can’t tolerate the sights and sounds of war, the tortured screams of the victims, the faces of the dead and dying, of the orphaned and bereft, should probably stop investing in war industries and voting for chicken hawks who send other people’s kids to die and to kill in the racket that is war.
Who are we to vote for then?
Help carry the sea bag, the big green heavy one, the one containing a large ball of fear and terror, and pain, and guilt and shame and yes, adrenaline and rage and overwhelming sadness.
Sadly, no such weight is carried by many who participated or are over there now. They feel defensive but pretty good, shot up some terrorists, can’t trust even the women and children, you know. Maybe even a little heroic, cuz that’s what the massive media is telling them how they should feel.
Ex-Iraq Soldiers Simpson and Lewis
Eva Golinger
September 8, 2009
Postcards from the RevolutionEva Golinger: Did people in your class [at Evergreen University, a traditionally very liberal state university in the state of Washington] know you were in the military? What did they say to you?
Josh Simpson: Yes, but people knew I was opposed to the war.
Benji Lewis: The “support the troops” campaign has altered everyone’s perception.
Simpson: I’m actually opposed to that campaign. People should have been more confrontational with the troops.
Golinger: Like in Vietnam.Lewis: The “support the troops” campaign was engineered to allow for indirect acceptance of the war.
Simpson: People are scared to criticize the troops, it’s considered the most blasphemous thing in the world. At the same time, if you are never criticized then you will never know that what you are doing is wrong.
Lewis: You can’t criticize the troops. It’s a poverty draft, these kids just do it because they have no other way out of poverty.
Simpson: But you have to criticize them, because they will say they are just following orders, but that’s bullshit, the Nazis were just following orders too. The military is fascist, it’s basically blind, unquestioning obedience. Then they try to tell you that the blind obedience is some form of courage and bravery.
The above and much direct testimony on war criminality by U.S. soldiers at the following two diaries:
War criminality, in U.S. soldiers’ words
by fairleft
Mon Nov 16th, 2009
Slam the Troops (War Criminals III, Support the Non-Troops II)
by fairleft
Thu Dec 10th, 2009
P.S. – The following, about Israel’s conduct in its massacre of Gaza, is so familiar to an American keeping track of our troops:
Tears of Gaza director: “How could one not want to show the world what is happening?”
By Joanne Laurier, 28 September 2010, wsws.org… The US government and media, and the Western powers generally, sat by and either encouraged the savagery, or did nothing to stop it. All of the individuals and institutions involved are complicit in war crimes. …
[The film’s producer, Terje Kristiansen]: The Israelis systematically destroy the infrastructure, the water system, building supplies, everything needed to keep a society going.
[The film’s director, Vibeke Løkkeberg]: They even bombed the sewer system. So everything goes straight into the Mediterranean. And this is where they swim. They squeeze them from all sides.
[WSWS’s] David Walsh: It’s called sociocide. The US military did the same thing in Iraq.
TK: That’s why casualty figures don’t give the true emotional sense of the crime. The main purpose of the film is to document the emotional impact of being the victim of a war. Images can change history. …
[WSWS’s] Joanne Laurier: One of the hardest parts of the film to watch is the three small children who had been shot at point blank range. They were deliberately executed.
VL: They took the whole family and shot them. They said, “Come out of the house,” and then shot them all. How could one not want to show the world what is happening in Gaza?
P.S. 2 – And then there was my very short diary:
Why no openly gay U.S. heroes killing Afghan peasants?!
By fairleft
September 22, 2010
eurotrib.comSorry. I can’t seem to find that story.
Deleted by eurotrib; okay, then here it is:
Why no openly gay U.S. heroes killing Afghan peasants?!
By fairleft
September 22, 2010
pffugeecamp.comWhy are there no openly gay U.S. heroes killing Afghan peasants?! We need to allow all gay women and men, whether openly or non-openly, the opportunity to heroically kill Afghan peasants evilly attempting to oust us from their country. If given a chance to die as an openly gay U.S. heroic Afghan peasant killer, our openly gay U.S. hero would return to a hero’s funeral, where openly and non-openly gay people and non-gay people too could gather to praise the brave service to country provided by an openly gay and now dead American hero.
afew, one of the eurotrib administrators, first accused me of being homophobic (which I rated `troll’) and then deleted the diary and all except his final comment. He justified this abuse because the diary was too short (but, of course, some ‘too short’ diaries aren’t and some are) and because it failed to address “the question of the recognition of homosexuality in the public sphere (whatever we may think of some of the activities involved).”
I said in my comment heading responding to afew’s first “I don’t get it” comment: “I’m not here to write what you want me to write.” (Actually, I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but that’s what deletion does to rational debate.) I then suggestively and hopefully blockquoted from a comment on the diary at firedoglake’s The Seminal:
If only things like your post could penetrate. I liken it to the fact that there is now, and has been for some time, a phenomenon known as “gay rodeo”, which apparently is meant to prove that gay people can be just as cruel to animals as straights. It’s all too reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s classic joke but in reverse. Why would they want to belong to a club that wouldn’t have them as a member?
And yet, regrettably, my effort at ‘get it’ failed, since that comment was responded to with the `homophobic’ accusation.
So, for those who didn’t get the point of the diary, here it is in humor-free summary form: I am opposed to “the public sphere” including state-sanctioned murder, and gays and straights alike should not participate in it, should not want to engage in it, and everyone should ‘man up’ and shout down the war criminals in our midst, even including those sad sack victims (regardless of sexual orientation), the soldiers who are killing, wounding and otherwise bullying the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq. So, the diary was about opposing anyone participating in “some of the activities involved,” i.e., in the immoral (but apparently fun for some) bloodfest that being in the U.S. military involves.
I know, read the FAQ.
P.S. 3 –
Ad posted at a rural New York high school. It reads,You can’t be all that you can be if you’re dead. There are other ways to serve your country. There are other ways to get money for college. There are other ways to be all you can be.
THINK ABOUT IT. Before you sign your life away.
Of course, the ad became ‘controversial’ …
Many opposed to the ad noted the school’s “Wall of Honor,” which displays photos and names of about 20 recent Warwick graduates currently serving in the military, many of whom are in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Making sure such dissonance/dishonor would never happen again, a couple months later the school board banned newspaper ads that could “associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy.”
This is the America many of us live in, and about the only possible way to penetrate it is sideways, with humor.
